Howtos and Tutorials

Opera 10 maintains the program’s tradition of striving to be the fastest, smallest, and most full-featured browser available. In this latest iteration, Opera replaced its JavaScript engine, remade the interface for Windows 7, and developed features that have solidified the company’s position as an innovator.

Opera 10.60 is a minor update to Opera 10.50, which introduced multiple new features. The biggest is one most users won’t see: Opera’s in-house anti-malware has been bolstered by AVG’s real-time threat detection network. The browser uses it to force users to see a warning page when they try to load sites that the network determines are in some way malicious. Version 10.60 adds more HTML5 support, including the next-generation video and audio codec WebM, geolocation compatibility, Web Workers, and App Cache. More importantly, Opera 10.60 claims benchmark times that are 50 percent faster than Opera 10.50. Internal CNET testing revealed that this number was closer to 33 percent, but that’s still a major improvement.

The big news in Opera 10.50 was the new JavaScript engine, Carakan, that made Opera arguably the fastest browser around. It also debuted full compatibility with Windows 7, which includes Aero Peek, jump lists, and a design redo that emphasizes Aero’s translucent window frames. Longtime Opera fans will notice that its menu bar has been hidden and replaced by a drop-down menu that compresses the options into a tree format. It has also highlighted the Closed Tabs box with a prominent tab bar icon styled on the Windows Recycle Bin, and its widgets have gained the capability to live on the desktop, separate from the browser. Opera has also introduced HTML5 video support in v10.50.

Opera is known for coming with an incredible number of features out of the box. It’s the basics such as tabbed browsing and tab previews, a customizable search bar, advanced bookmarking tools, and native e-mail and chat client options. But it also has mouse-gesture support, keyboard shortcuts, password management, anti-malware protection from Haute Secure, and drag-and-drop functionality. Its more-exciting options include Opera Link for synchronizing bookmarks, your personal bar, Speed Dial, and Notes via My Opera. Opera Unite expands My Opera by letting you create an Opera-hosted Web server to share files and stream media. For users on slower connections, the toggleable Opera Turbo compression engine feeds sites through Opera’s own servers for faster load times.

Gishore J Kallarackal is the founder of techgurulive. The purpose of this site is to share information about free resources that techies can use for reference. You can follow me on the social web, subscribe to the RSS Feed or sign up for the email newsletter for your daily dose of tech tips & tutorials. You can content me via @twitter or e-mail.